1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of power hand tools and more particularly to a powered hand tool for making crimped electrical contacts.
2. Description of the Prior Art
During the construction of an aircraft, particularly military aircraft carrying a substantial amount of electronic equipment and other electrically activated or powered devices, thousands of electrical lines must be laid out within the aircraft and electrical connections made with the electronic equipment and devices. Therefore, thousands of wire-to-wire electrical connections must be made within a single aircraft or vehicle during its production. Conventional soldering techniques thus become prohibitively slow and expensive. Therefore, the electrical connections must be made mechanically, typically by crimping a contact.
The tool by which such mechanical connections are made must be easily hand held so that it may be used at the site of wire harness fabrication.
Hand-held manually powered electrical crimping tools are well known and are typically employed in such instances. While such manually powered tools produce acceptable crimps in the hands of a skilled operator, are inexpensive, and can quickly and inexpensively make the electrical connection, the possibility of human error in the use of the tool, affecting the quality of the connection, and the possibility or eventuality of simple fatigue in the prolonged use of such tools by the operator, affecting productivity, is endemic to the aircraft industry.
Production crimping of electrical contacts has been practiced in the aerospace industry for more than 35 years. During this time, numerous improvements in production crimping technology have occurred, starting from single gauge hand-held crimping tools which provided a single indent crimp on a contact barrel to present day bench mounted automatic crimpers which can simultaneously accommodate up to five different contact gauges while producing 8-indent crimps within less than one second.
However, current wire harness production techniques require that over 25% of all the wire contact terminations, such as second end terminations, be completed on the harness form boards. This means that hand-held crimpers must be used.
What is needed is a crimping tool which would virtually eliminate operator fatigue while providing a reduction in man-hours devoted to the production of crimped electrical contacts along with increased work output.
Therefore, what is needed is an automatic power crimper for making electrical connections which can be hand held, which will quickly and inexpensively make uniform high quality electrical contacts.